Social dilemmas, as the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, are an intrinsic part of our society. For many years, they have aroused the curiosity of many scientists interested in revealing the true motivations of human behavior and under what specific conditions people tend to cooperate or defect. It is thus becoming clear that there is a need to conduct experiments that validate or refute the different mechanisms suggested in relation to the emergence human cooperation in specific contexts. We started to work on the subject of evolutionary dynamics thinking on general problems in the biological and sociological fields.

This is the reason why we first approached the problem from a theoretical perspective. However, as time went on, our interest shifted to the study of social systems, and specifically to the question of how humans behave, both as individuals and collectively. In such a context, it becomes mandatory to depart from theoretical assumptions and look at the system under study as we, physicists, are used to do. This implies testing and validating theories and developing models that will be meaningfully informed with the rules found via experimentation.

Our objectives are therefore:

To carry out experiments that would not only be useful for demonstration and validation purposes, but also for obtaining results about human behavior in specific situations. We are specifically interested in performing, large-scale, possibly cross-cultural experiments.

To develop a platform (software and hardware, including communications) that allows carrying out socio-economic or techno-social experiments with a number of participants in the order of thousands.

To build a toolbox (algorithms and hardware) for the analysis of the experimental data in an efficient and seamless way including the most advanced techniques.

To implement the findings of the experiments in terms of models and simulation modules that would make it possible the realistic modeling of large social systems, contributing in this way new standards in experimental and computational social science.

We hope, with our experimental and theoretical program,
to be in the position of answering questions such as:

How cooperation emerges and evolves in humans?

What is the interplay of social context and cooperative behavior?

What are the mechanisms that promote cooperative behaviour in humans?

Can we build realistic models of how individuals behave and use them to study societal and organizational dynamics?